A major challenge in Information Technology (xe2x80x9cITxe2x80x9d) development is not the technologies, but rather the management of those technologies in a complex business environment. IT activities must be managed collectively and include idea conception, strategy development, capability delivery, planning, administration, operation, coordination of project requests, change administration, and managing demand for discretionary and non-discretionary activities and operations. The technological and business environment demands a shared understanding and representation of IT management. A technological management orientation needs ways to plan, assess, and deploy technology within and across enterprises. Business needs to balance technological capability with enterprise capability in order to become or stay a competitive organization.
Within an IT organization, there is a need to construct a complete yet simple IT framework that quickly conveys the entire scope of IT capability in a functional composition. The IT framework must be a single framework for describing IT management. The IT framework also needs to be a framework of all functions, representing a complete checklist of all relevant activities performed in an IT enterprise. A single IT Framework should represent all functions operative in an IT enterprise.
There also is a need for a capacity modeling and planning function to ensure appropriate system resources are available to handle the business workloads, to enable business capabilities, and to ensure target service levels are reached. By marketing current IT service offerings, increasing customer satisfaction, and building stronger customer relationships, the IT enterprise may provide better service to its business customer.
In addition, previous estimators of the capacity modeling and planning function gave only line cost figures and were directed to business rather than OM functions. It could take days or weeks before an IT consultant produced these figures for the client. If the project came in either above or below cost, there was no way of telling who or what was responsible.
As competition to provide IT services increases from outsourcers, capacity modeling and planning and a corresponding estimator are becoming more critical to the IT enterprise. To meet this competition, improved methods and estimators are needed for providing a capacity modeling and planning function for an IT framework.
The present invention is defined by the following claims, and nothing in this section should be taken as a limitation on those claims. By way of introduction, one embodiment of the invention is a method for providing capacity modeling and planning that includes planning, designing, building, testing, and deploying a capacity modeling and planning function for an IT organization.
The planning step preferably includes developing a business performance model. The designing step preferably includes designing business processes, skills, and user interaction, and may also include designing an organization infrastructure, designing a performance enhancement infrastructure, and designing technology infrastructure and operations architecture.
In yet another aspect of the preferred embodiment, the building step preferably includes building the technology infrastructure, building the operations architecture, business policies, procedures, performance support, and developing learning products for the capacity modeling and planning.
In another aspect of the preferred embodiment, the testing step preferably includes testing the technology infrastructure, and testing the operations architecture for capacity modeling and planning.
In still another aspect of the preferred embodiment, the developing step includes deploying the technology infrastructure for the IT enterprise.
Another aspect of the present invention is a method for providing an estimate for building a capacity modeling and planning function in an information technology organization. This aspect of the present invention allows an IT consultant to give on site estimations to a client within minutes. The estimator produces a detailed break down of cost and time to complete a project by displaying the costs and time corresponding to each stage of a project along with each task. Another aspect of the present invention is a computer system for allocating time and computing cost for building a capacity modeling and planning function in an information technology organization.